Today’s capital against yesteryear’s problems

Suppose it’s the early 1730s, just after the discovery of electrical conduction.  Installation of power lines won’t take place until the 1880s, and the first long distance telephone line won’t be installed until 1877 (which puts it in the wrong order, chronilogically, but that surprised me so much I won’t edit this paragraph.)

In this context, suppose further that you’re approaching some entity with lots of money (a King, a church, some merchant consortium, what have you) with a crazy plan: you’re going to string wire all over the country on wooden poles. What will it be for?  You answer honestly: I have no idea, but I’m sure the users will find an application.

I think about this kind of thing when I read the umpteenth article questioning how Twitter’s going to make money.  The thing of it is, lots of companies are founded on this basis – there’s something there, and we don’t know what it is, but it’s worth a try just for the sake of finding out.

I have no idea how much it would have cost, in today’s dollars, to wire up even a portion of the United States in the 1730s.  What’s interesting to me is that today’s investments in social infrastructure aren’t necessarily a bargain in comparison (millions of dollars are still millions of dollars,) but I wonder how speculative some investments of centuries past were according to the wisdom of the time.